White House launches climate data portal

Mar. 20, 2014 - 06:00AM
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A new climate data portal will provide maps and information for the public, drawing on government data sets. ()

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The administration is building on its climate change mitigation efforts by launching a climate data portal to boost awareness and provide greater transparency.

The portal — climate.data.gov— will gather data on climate change in one place. It will launch with coastal flooding and sea level rise data, according to a March 19 blog post by presidential counselor John Podesta and John Hodren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology.

The new effort will also include an innovation challenged sponsored by NASA and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration to develop data-driven simulations to help future planning efforts and boost awareness of the effects of climate change.

ESRI, the company that produces the software used by local and regional planning experts, will be partnering with 12 cities across the country to create free and open maps and apps to help local governments plan for climate change.

Google will also be donating one petabyte of cloud storage data and 50 million hours of high-performance computing to help with the effort, they said.

“By taking the enormous data sets regularly collected by NASA, NOAA, and other agencies and applying the ingenuity, creativity, and expertise of technologists and entrepreneurs, the Climate Data Initiative will help create easy-to-use tools for regional planners, farmers, hospitals, and businesses across the country—and empower America’s communities to prepare themselves for the future,” they said.